Page 44 of Ricochet

“Who … who are you? You look familiar.” His eyes squinted as he studied my face, until they widened, damn near popping out of his head. “You’re … I know you.” Surprise quickly turned to sobs. “I know you,” he said on a wail. “Please don’t kill me, man. Please.” He rocked as much as he could against the ropes. “This place. The voices. The ghosts. I’m fucking going crazy up in here!”

“Do you know how old my son was when you shot him in the back, Julius?” I hammered my fist into his face before he could answer, knocking a tooth free that splashed into the water. “Five. Five years old.”

After slicing into the man’s ear, my head is wrenched back, and a fist pounds into my cheek, until all I can do is drop to the floor, half conscious. The room spins out of control, and smack in the middle is red.

My son’s red pajamas.

He backs himself away from the room filled with a view that will ruin him for the rest of his life. “Daddy?” He cries, and all I want to do is scoop him up. Tell him it’ll be okay, hold him to make sure some small part of him hasn’t been destroyed by what he’s seen, but the blackness is filtering in quickly.

I crawl toward him. “Jay?” I reach out for him with a trembling hand.

Black boots block my view. “Hey … little man. I’ll give you five seconds to run. Five. Four.”

My screams reverberate inside my skull as the seconds tick quickly.

My son is silenced with a bullet.

“I’m … sorry.” Julius’s words carried a lisp and snapped me from memories. “We … we was told to …”

I hit him again, kicking his head to the side once more, and he spat blood. “His birthday was in two days. He’d been telling me all week how excited he was. How he couldn’t wait to blow out six birthday candles on his cake.” I choked back the tears at the memory, allowing the pain and fury to give me the crazed rush of adrenaline I craved. “But that never happened.”

“Please don’t kill me, man. Please.”

I tugged the knife from my hip with one hand and gripped his jaw, reaching in with the other to take hold of his tongue. He bit down onto my finger, and I drilled another punch to his face, knocking out a front tooth. Against the screaming and kicking, I sliced his tongue clean from his mouth.

Choking fits and gurgles had my lip crimping.

“Not so much the sweet talker now, are you, Julius?” I waved his severed tongue in the air and tossed it into the water. Cramming the barrel of my gun into his mouth, I chewed on my lip for a moment, waiting for his bawling to die down. “Hey … little man. I’ll give you five seconds to run. Five.”

His scream brought a smile to my face.

“Four. Three. Two.” I pulled back the hammer. “Are you ready to be set free?”

Blackness filtered in.

***

Peeling off the black leather gloves coated in sticky blood, I tossed them to the floor and nabbed a pair of tongs from inside a plastic bag. I had Alec to thank for all the sterile technique. He’d taught me all the ways that police processed evidence in the lab, how even the tiniest fibers could be analyzed. I’d had no idea an entire genetic code could be found at the root of a single human hair. Fascinating.

Alec was something of a Jack of all trades. While I probably would’ve been inclined to throw caution to the wind, sending the recording to DeMarcus Corley without a single thought for the possibility that they could identify me, Alec insisted on taking great care in eliminating the possibility.

Keeping to his demands, I set the envelope on a plastic square I’d laid on the front seat of my car and addressed the package to the only cop who’d earned my trust so far.

Perhaps he’d find some use out of Julius’s confession.

CHAPTER 20

Nick

With a plate of food in one hand, I entered Aubree’s room, finding her sprawled on her stomach, reading. “Still working on that book?”

She rolled to her side and propped her head on her palm, looking like some fucking Flintstones pinup with her torn, ragged dress, and a sudden rush of heat shot through my body. “It’s the only one I have, so I’m taking my time with it.”

She went back to her reading, undeterred, when I set the plate down.

I tossed her a T-shirt and a pair of my sweats, almost hating to make her change, but goddamn it, I didn’t need to think about her that way whenever she decided to wash her panties. I had bigger shit going down. Besides, she was the enemy for chrissakes—an argument that seemed to be losing steam with each passing day.

It wasn’t until I’d already gotten halfway to the door that I heard her shift on the bed, and something soft hit the back of my head.